


A Garland of Shame

by VoluptuousPanic



Category: Babylon Berlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Infidelity, It'll End in Tears - Freeform, Jealousy, Survivor Guilt, WW1, Weimar Republic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:54:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23207317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoluptuousPanic/pseuds/VoluptuousPanic
Summary: And now a note from Helga. This is another deep-dive vignette written months ago in small scraps while "Love Will Tear Us Apart Again," "Mit Dir," and "Voll und Warm in the Dark" were in process. I don't find Helga a particularly sympathetic character and inside her head isn't a very nice place. It's over, and she knows it is.
Relationships: Gereon Rath & Charlotte Ritter, Gereon Rath/Charlotte Ritter, Gereon Rath/Helga Rath, Helga Rath/Anno Rath
Comments: 5
Kudos: 37





	A Garland of Shame

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Гирлянда позора](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29226654) by [CorsaireVert](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorsaireVert/pseuds/CorsaireVert)



Sometimes when Helga looked at Gereon she could see the boy he had been. How she’d humored with him with empty gestures, empty promises when he was fourteen, when he was fifteen, when she was just a girl, too old for a suitable match with him, but old enough to be courted by Anno. How she’d reveled in being the object of their attention, the beautiful piggy in the middle between them, though she’d always known who would win the prize. Severin pointed it out when they were still in school together, still children, long before he was sent away, and a part of her still hated him for it because she wasn’t like that. She wasn’t ever cruel. Boys simply had their places, as did brothers, and things were different then. The world was different then. Anno and Gereon knew where they stood; one the sort of upright and superlative boy a girl of a certain class should design to marry, the other the dreamy, gentle sort one loves forever. Alliances were real. Fairytales were not. And Helga encouraged Gereon because she could make him smile, make him stutter, and make Anno laugh. How Gereon’s eyes had followed her, lighting on her hair, the fall of her dress, the length of her round, white arm. How Gereon couldn’t look away even as his brother led her through a waltz, through the grounds, down the aisle. How she’d loved Anno. How she’d loved the way the way that everyone, and Gereon, looked at her when she was on Anno’s arm. 

When she was a child, before the arrangements between families were made a reality, Helga had planned everyone’s futures: she and Anno together in the Rath house with its grand rooms and modest grounds. Anno would have his medical practice, and she would run the house, and maybe later the estate, and perhaps her family’s as well unless her brother Thorwald saw fit not to be idle. Gereon would be a priest, and if he didn’t take orders, a deacon with a private apartment, rather than a room at the rectory, with perhaps a wife and children. Ursula would carry on with the miserable Johannes, who was at least a better prospect than Thorwald would be. And Severin. There was never a place for Severin except to charge in like a Keystone Cop and leave in disarray the dollhouse that Helga arranged and rearranged in her head and heart. Just as Helga didn’t dwell on the idea of Gereon someday marrying, she didn’t dwell on the judgment Anno had passed on Severin, who shattered his father’s dreams of a succession of influence through Polizeipräsidium Köln. But how she switched Anno’s and Gereon’s places and moved them back again though Gereon was just a boy, too young for a girl of her age. Anno would never be a priest, but Helga could be a deacon’s wife. A deacon of the right social station would be far from poor and such work would suit Gereon’s nature. She had only to decide the kind of wife she wanted to be.

When Severin left for America, everything changed. Anno lost his only rival for attention, if only in the form of Englebert Rath’s ire, and Gereon lost the the only anchor he had before he turned to God and went away to Bonn to make his mother happy. Anno left for the front, riding away on Yucatan with a column of other junior officers, handsome and dashing in their uniforms. And Gereon returned home at his father’s demand, seventeen and nearly a man, to be made ready to join the infantry under Anno’s command and follow him to defeat France, defeat England. How naked then Gereon made her feel with his huge, sad eyes and sullen, angelic face those short weeks they were in the house together before he was sent to the barracks and then the front, when her body rapidly changed as Moritz grew inside her. Gereon spoke of a choice then, as if leaving for America, heavily pregnant, in the company of her husband’s baby brother would would ever have been something she’d have done. They’d have been destitute, both disowned and disinherited, abandoned, with no one but Severin to turn to. Though she knew now such things didn’t matter a fig to Gereon, that he would bob like a cork and allow life to happen to him, she wasn’t cut out for poverty or not being provided for.

_“Kiss me,” Gereon begged. He clutched at her, pushing at her with his hips with a forwardness and desperation she’d never seen in him. She could have fallen into his eyes, and did. Relenting, she let him cup her face in his hands and kiss her as if he was the one who would be returning to her after the war ended. He was just a boy, barely seventeen, and she could see it now in the softness of his jaw, the ghost of stubble that shaded his cheek, the hope in his in his sweet, questioning smile and big, heavy-lidded hazel eyes that were so unlike his brother’s._

_“My choice is already made,” she answered when it was over, tearing herself away from Gereon, from his trembling hands on her hips and the roundness of her belly. She looked to Anno in the other room, how his attention was on them, sudden, curious, but mostly impatient._

_There was panic then on Gereon’s usually placid face, all sweetness and hope gone as he shoved his arms into the sleeves of his uniform jacket. The wool settled on him and he held his shoulders in his ears as if he were in pain. Helga helped him with his buttons and patted his cheek when she found Anno looking on. Her handsome boy. And her handsome man._

_“So schön,” Anno said as he entered, his tone slightly mocking. He scrubbed his hand through Gereon’s close cropped hair with cruel affection. Anno crossed the room again and tossed Gereon’s hat to him. “Auf geht’s, kleiner Wurm.”_

Helga fooled herself sometimes, still entertained the notion, as she always had, that Moritz could have been Gereon’s. They’d had enough opportunity before he was sent to barracks, though he’d been too afraid, and she’d been stymied by what to do when Gereon was unwilling, or perhaps too inexperienced, to coax her to do the things she’d done with Anno before they’d wed. The things that had happened with Gereon stopped at breathless kisses, pawing at each other in the pantry, in empty rooms, in the grounds at night, Gereon trembling in her arms, mute with desire, until he would tear himself away to run back to his room as likely to flagellate himself as abuse his flesh, leaving her to what end? To curl herself around her growing belly in the bed where she’d given herself to Anno, and where she would give birth. It took only a glance at Moritz, however, to remind her who his father was, and to remind her that beyond those kisses, Gereon had never touched her until she touched him first. 

When the war ended and Anno didn’t come home, Gereon returned from France hollow and broken, only to face influenza and his mother’s death. Helga felt those months were something she weathered, exhausted, sick with grief, with a toddler on her hip, distraught and disheveled, utterly unlike herself. Anno was simply gone, plucked indefinitely from the life that had merely gone on without him with the exception of the days and nights, Easter and Christmas, and other short durations during which he’d been allowed to return over the preceding four years. Short leaves during which Moritz was conceived, and during which they’d married when she was too far gone to hide or to make other decisions, as if she’d ever be the sort of harpy who could do such things. As for many women, Helga’s marriage to Anno was about lack, punctuated by excitement, anticipation, perfunctory correspondence, dread. The ambiguity sustained after Armistice was like purgatory, and it made sense to carry on as if Anno would return home sooner, or later, whole or horrifically disfigured, or irrevocably damaged without a scratch like Gereon. It made sense to remain in the Rath home, to take on Frau Rath’s social obligations, to carry on as Anno’s wife, to show Köln society a brave face, that she, and the family, would faithfully wait for Anno’s return. And she gradually embraced the possibility of being a widow, without reproach. The morning Helga found Gereon asleep holding Moritz was the morning that she decide she wanted him, that she could make Gereon Moritz’s father in secret at least. She called Gereon to her bed that night, where she learned that Gereon’s tenderness made him no more skillful a lover than his brother, only curious and unsure, and where she learned that it was all men, and not just Anno, who wanted to do things that made her feel dirty. Though Gereon had always been an innately persuasive kisser, he now wanted to look at her, begged to put his mouth to her, asked for her mouth on him, something Anno had merely taunted her with. Those weren’t the ways in which a wife served a husband, though they were the ways in which they could take care to prevent proof of their indiscretion. They were too fragile to finish, and Helga was ashamed of what she wanted, that she wanted only to be ravished, taken, used expediently the way that Anno had done. Gereon wanted to touch and be touched, wanted sensation and an unending oblivion of climax that Helga couldn’t offer him. Only morphine did. She wanted to curse France for taking Anno, and for putting ideas into the heads of broken men returning home who should be concentrated on healing, on moving on, on being husbands and fathers again. Gereon was neither, and she saw it now that he was twenty-nine, in starker relief than she ever had when he was nineteen and became hers alone. 

The first time she saw the girl—Charlotte, who was hardly a girl, Helga knew that it was over. That Gereon was lost to her, though he still shared her bed, and, as far as she knew, had never touched Charlotte. It was something in the way that he came to her, a different man in bed. Something in the way he touched her, a self-possession and confidence that she though at first was just Berlin, that he’d been on his own for weeks, that he missed her, that they were truly alone together for the first time. Instead, it was another woman. Or women. She didn’t know, and didn’t trust herself, and suddenly didn’t trust Gereon enough to ask. Or maybe she didn’t trust Berlin. 

_“Now?” Helga asked, feeling Gereon’s desperation, his hips already in rut, the rarity of his erection jutting at her thigh though his skin was both fevered and clammy with morphine. She found herself helplessly hauling up her skirt and chemise, pulling the crotch of her knickers aside for his touch that used to be gentle. Now, at this moment, she knew it was to see if she was wet enough._

_“Now,” he whispered back, grappling with his braces and then his flies, struggling onto and into her._

_It was the same as always. Functional, brief, thought she wondered now if she’d mistaken expedience and effort as passion in the moments Gereon wasn’t especially tender._

Why any other woman, she asked herself. But most of all why Charlotte? A skinny, shapeless, sooty-eyed, fast young girl with unkempt hair, moth-eaten coat, pert breasts loose in her blouse, trousers—trousers!—hanging on her hips as insouciantly as if she was a boy. Maybe that was it, that a part of Gereon was like Severin. What irked Helga most was Charlotte’s green silk hat, finer than any Helga had ever owned, and that Helga knew how girls like Charlotte came by such luxuries. Had Gereon given Charlotte money? Maybe it was that in spite of all these things that should make Charlotte ugly, Helga couldn’t look away from whatever it was that made Charlotte glow. How a girl so poor, so slattern, so gauche had such dignity and commanded such attention. And that when she saw them through a window—her Gereon and dun-colored Charlotte—reviewing a stack of files together at a table at an Aschinger, Gereon was as luminous as a man could be, eyes sparkling with a smile that Helga had never seen in all the years she knew him. A smile that was for Charlotte only, but tugged at Helga nonetheless. A smile full of desire, humor, interest, secrets, and pride, accompanied by a look on his face, a tilt of his head that she hadn’t seen since he was a boy. This Gereon was different to the one she knew, and Helga suddenly felt as if she’d never known the whole of him. And there was something complimentary in their natures—Gereon’s and Charlotte’s—they were equals, colleagues, conspirators and possibly lovers. The realization made Helga feel like a child. Yet she was the one with a child, a child who needed a father now that she and Gereon could at last marry, a child that would soon be the age that Gereon was when he left home. What could Charlotte possibly offer? 

She rationalized allowing Gereon to keep Charlotte on the side if they married, if he gave her another child, if he gave her a home to manage. He could keep Charlotte as someone with whom he could indulge in acts unbecoming of a father. If he came home at night, went to mass, was discreet. But he’d stopped doing those things already. Helga didn’t want to think of the things he did with Charlotte, but they flooded her head nevertheless, and were all the things she wouldn’t let him do, or remained afraid to find pleasure in, things she’d endured with Anno. Did Gereon come to Charlotte as sweetly, as gently as he did with her, or had Charlotte simply taken him, seduced him, eaten him alive? Or was Gereon a different man entirely with Charlotte; forceful, passionate, dominant? Helga doubted that. As unsure as she was about the way things were as they’d unravelled uncontrollably since the day Gereon had been shot, Helga was quite certain his gentleness, sensitivity, and forthrightness remained, but that his trust and faith had wavered, and were slowly being built anew elsewhere. 

As the days passed she saw Gereon and Charlotte together, or imagined seeing them, only to realize that the couple kissing passionately on the corner, heedless of onlookers, were a small man in a workman’s coverall and a hotel maid who passed him train fare and a handkerchief wrapped sandwich from her bag when they parted. Another time, a couple outside of Tietz, a slim and dark young woman in a smart knitted suit on the arm of a man in brown tweed with a fawn topcoat and hat. Every man of a certain age and disposition wore a fawn topcoat and snap brim. Yet another time, at a private club of Mr. Nyssen’s choosing, a young couple resting, taking a breather from the dance floor, lazily kissing in a nook by the downstairs bar, the girl so like Charlotte, but Gereon would never be so indiscreet as to take Charlotte dancing, so forward as to nearly ravish her in public, so louche as to be in shirtsleeves with his collar open. 

The only time Helga was sure she saw them together was the morning her suspicions that it was Charlotte and not another girl were confirmed, after a night that Gereon hadn’t returned home, a morning after attempting to distract herself by paying a call on poor Emmi Wolter. A morning on a side street off Tauentzienstraße near KaDeWe at the sort of bohemian cafe she’d never patronize, where she saw Gereon and Charlotte amongst other couples, amongst T-girls and kontrol girls and the men who paid for them, canoodling over coffee, sharing a lingering French kiss and then a single crumpled cigarette. It was clear that neither had slept. And it was clear to Helga that they were lovers. She watched from the sidewalk, speechless and ashamed, as they kissed hungrily, their mouths open, Gereon’s tongue pushing into Charlotte’s mouth, hers into his. Kissing like that, at a terrace table on the street, and hardly the only ones. Had he ever looked like that when he’d kissed her? It wasn’t the way Gereon leaned into Charlotte that gutted Helga, it was what Charlotte did when the kiss was over, that she smiled tenderly and rubbed her nose against his, then kissed his forehead, that she placed the cigarette between his lips and lit it, and that all the while he looked at Charlotte, his attention focused, his eyes tired and impossibly heavy but with no sadness in them. Charlotte asked him something, a few short words, and he smiled almost boyishly, bashfully with a roll of eye and playful exasperation, and responded, a few short words, with a nod. He passed the cigarette to Charlotte and returned to his coffee, taking her ungloved hand even as he called to a waiter. Helga turned on her heel before she was discovered, striding purposefully yet aimlessly away, hot tears streaming down her cheeks. The sobs of abandonment came later at home, where there was a calling card from Mr. Nyssen.


End file.
